The New RidePost

To celebrate one year since launching RidePost we released an all new look to RidePost. Version 2 of RidePost takes into account an entire year worth of feedback and communication from our growing member base. Our goal was to address the challenges we hear the most and plan accordingly for continued future growth. Our major issues to address:

• Focus on People: In order to eliminate anonymity in travel, we want to showcase our members. When finding a ride on RidePost you will know more about the person you are traveling with than if you would have been in a plane, a train or a bus. This now starts from the very first page.

• Recurring Trips: Commuting sucks and finding a carpool is historically difficult because people’s schedules change for kids, weather, family etc. However, with the cost of daily commuting adding up (gas, maintenance, car payments, parking, tolls, etc) more people are using RidePost to find others in the area to match up and form a flexible carpool with to work or campus. After talking with many of our members we have a new way for people to post and find others nearby to join in a recurring ride.

• Member Dashboard: All the information you need about past, current and future bookings is now available for you in your user dashboard.

• Simple Landing Page: A landing page is like a front door. Click here to see our new front door: New Landing Page

• Mobile Friendly: We see higher volumes of mobile traffic every week, so we made a big update here. More specific data and stats on this below.

• Move One More Step Forward: We want to be the best in the world at solving transportation problems. So as we do with any decision, large or small, we worked on solutions to make RidePost better than we were the day before.

Here are a few of the highlights to the new RidePost and why they happened:

New Look: As a record number of people are looking for alternative transportation, one area we can have an impact is to remove anonymity from travel. We focused our redesign on people first. You will now see much more information about people and their reputation before deciding to accept or decline a booking.

Mobile Friendly: Many RidePosters loved the look and feel of RidePost since our launch (hat tip to the fine design team at KA+A for their help there). However there was one recurring theme: viewing RidePost on your phone was a challenge. To be honest, booking a trip on a smart phone before was about as fun as going to the DMV. Well we have taken a step forward on mobile, now you can find and book rides with ease on RidePost.com. We made the decision early on at RidePost to build web first for two main reasons:

1. Web design and development was the strength of our team
2. RidePost trips are meant to be booked in advance – similar to a bus, plane or train ticket

78% of our traffic still comes through desktop and laptop browsers, however what we realized over the last 6 months was a growing portion of our traffic is coming from mobile browsers. Our traffic today is 22% mobile – up from 15% just 6 months ago – and growing in both volume and proportion of our overall traffic. We knew that with any major development project, we would need to invest in our mobile site. As a result you will see a completely new experience on RidePost via your smartphone today.

New Features:

• Commuting: We tested this with an MVP style hack on one of our private networks – thanks wufoo. While testing it, we had a higher number of conversions than expected, so we have now launched what we believe is the easiest way to find others looking for a flexible commute schedule.
• Account Dashboard: Under “My Account” you can see the number of trips you have made, the number of RidePost events you have upvoted and how many people you have referred to RidePost – note: the more friends you refer to us, the more likely we are to send you free stuff :)
• My Rides: A common ask from members was an easier way to view your past rides and future bookings. Now you will be able to view not only the rides you have posted, but any other ride you are a part of in the past and future.
• Accounts: If you offer a ride to another RidePost member, now you can use that money toward your future travel. Kind of like free money for you. When you are ready to cash out, you can send the balance of your RidePost account straight to your bank account.
• Ride Cancelation: Now if your plans change or you request a seat with someone by accident you can cancel your trip – self service. No more frantic chatting with our support team at 3am – although we love hearing from you anytime.
• Store: We now have RidePost logo items available here: RidePostShop.com
• It doesn’t stop there, we have more goodies throughout the site and more on the way.

How Did We Do It? 

We get asked this question alot so we thought we would answer it here. We did all our work internally. We have an amazing and talented team at RidePost and everyone had a big part in our updates. Special hat tip goes to Robert as he led the development and redesign.

Going Forward:

Exciting times at RidePost. We have exceeded our growth targets this summer and look forward to continuing to offer the best transportation tools for our growing member base.

Our Vision:

The RidePost Vision is to build the 4th Element of Public Transportation. A cost effective, safe and reliable network. We won’t get you around town, but we will get you out of town.

Thank you for being a part of our journey – we are just getting started.

The RidePost Team